In today’s collect, we pray to God, “that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal….”

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“Preparing for Death”

I remember watching my father breathe his last breath and literally expire. One minute my father lay sick, and the next minute his body lay dead. Right before was the last minute of my life with him, and right after was the first minute of my life without him.

Anguish washed over my soul. I did not know how to breathe without him in my life; I did not know how to eat, sleep, or go to school without his presence. But I learned. And learning how to live my life without him was horrible beyond description.

We fear death. We fear death because in dying we leave this way of existence and head into another way of existence, a way which we know nothing about by personal experience.

We fear death because we have seen others die. We continue on, and they apparently do not. We wish to continue on, even if our current life is miserable. We instinctively cherish our own lives and do not want to give them up.

We fear death because death comes when the body sustains irreparable damage by accident, disease, or age. All three are deeply ugly in our sight. We shudder when we imagine ourselves receiving damage from a horrible accident, or succumbing to a deadly disease, or wasting away in our elder infirmity. We would rather live in our youthful bodies, or failing that, our bodies as we currently have them.

We fear death because we naturally perceive that death is contrary to the created order of things. Why would God create us if we were to die? God Incarnate, Christ Himself cried when He beheld the dead body of His friend Lazarus. If God who overcomes death cries at death, we who cannot overcome death certainly quail in its presence.

Death is one of the essential facts of Creation’s brokenness. The other is sin, intimately related to death.

In Genesis, we read that “God created the heaven and the earth.” And after each day of Creation, “God saw that it was good.” Except on the last day, when “God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” On that sixth day, “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”

So the human race is the capstone upon Creation, that finishing part that made it “very good” in God’s sight. We were to live with God for all eternity in the Garden. Possessing both body and soul, we were to walk with God and enjoy his immediate and direct presence.

But our ancestors broke our communion with God when they defied him and sought to live in power and glory without him, partaking of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And lest they stretched forth their hands and partake of the Tree of Life, God expelled them from the Garden.

So it is that death is an unnatural state brought upon by Man’s Fall into sin. It is necessarily related to sin. Sin brought death into the world of men. The only way to remedy death is by remedying sin.

Death is a miserable predicament. Death breaks asunder that which God created to be one. We are meant to be whole, body and soul. Death is like unto divorce, which rips apart that which God has joined together. Once God has put these things together into one essential and holy thing, it is against nature and God to destroy it. Thus, death is an abomination by its nature and by its disobedience to God’s will.

We brought upon ourselves this death, this destruction. By following their will instead of God’s will, Adam and Eve chose to destroy themselves. They didn’t know what they were getting into, but out of their stupid lust they went and wrecked what God had created.

And we are no better than they were. You and I are guilty of this sin. We have caused our own deaths. Even the best of us “have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;” By thinking that our ways are better than God’s ways, we stray from him. God is the creator, nurturer, and sustainer of life; yet we think that we can create, nurture, and sustain ourselves away from him. Each one of us has earned his own death.

So from the time of Adam and Eve until the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, death reigned in the lives of men without any sure remedy. But God did not leave men alone. The Patriarchs spoke with God personally, and he guided them. God gave the Law through Moses to Israel. God sent the Prophets to preach to Israel.

Then, as St. Paul wrote in Galatians iv.4: “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman ….” Christ became Man, uniting the fulness of divinity and the fulness of humanity in one holy Person. St. Paul also wrote in Romans xiv.9, “For to this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and living.”

We need not die like those without hope. Christ took on our mortal human nature and died. God the Father sent God the Son into the world as the Christ, the Messiah, the Savior of the world. And He conquered death. But He conquered death in a most interesting way: Christ conquered death by dying Himself. He apparently yielded to sin and death.

But no! Christ rose from the grave, defeating death and sin. In Christ, we are victorious over the grave. The grave has claimed the life of almost every man who ever lived, save only Enos and Elijah in the Old Testament. Christ has destroyed the hold of the grave over us. Yet we must enter the grave just like our Lord Christ did. Each of us will die, but for those who are counted among the redeemed of the Lord, we will live with God for all eternity.

So, given that each of us must die unless the Lord returns first, it obviously follows that we must prepare for our deaths. I say obviously, but sometimes it doesn’t seem obvious at all. I want to forget that I will die, my body will rot, and my soul will flee. I want to live my life blissfully ignoring this obvious fact of my life. I want to ignore it because I want to do whatever I want whenever I want. I want to dictate the terms of my life to God, just like Adam and Eve did, just you do, just like we all do.

This is wrong. But we still do it. So, the first thing we must do to prepare for our inevitable end is to think upon our death each and every day. This is called memento mori. Some will object that this is morbid and sad. To this the Church answers that the only way to life everlasting is through faith in Christ, and that means that we must think on our death and on our Savior. So first, remember that you will die.

Secondly, we must not only remember that we will die but have faith in Christ and repent of our sins. The minimum duty of Churchmen, the Six Duties of Churchmen, are not only our least duty but also our saving path.

We must attend Mass each and every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation. We must receive the Body and Blood of Christ at least three times a year, one of those times being during Christmastide. We must tithe, fast, and keep the Church’s rules for sexual relations. And we must keep our consciences clean. These tidily fall into three sections for preparing ourselves for Heaven.

First, we must focus upon the objective worship of Christ in the Mass. We each subjectively worship Christ in many parts of our lives, such as holy thoughts, devout feelings, and inspired sharing. But Christ gave us His Body and Blood to partake of it, not to ignore it. When we join ourselves with Christ’s offering of Himself to the Father, we mystically join together with Christ. A woman who has done this reverently for seventy years is better prepared to meet Christ’s Judgement than a man who mostly forgets to show up to worship.

Second, tithing, fasting, and keeping the Church’s Law of Marriage help us live our lives in the moral way Christ would have us live them. We ought to be generous, loving, patient, self-sacrificing, and treat our selves and other people’s selves in holiness and godliness. If we were to tithe, fast, and keep ourselves sexually as we are supposed to while worshipping God and keeping our consciences pure, then we would find ourselves moving in the right direction to God, thus preparing for our judgement.

Third, we must keep our consciences pure. On the one hand, we must avoid sin and eagerly seek after righteousness. On the other hand, we must confess our sins. Thus we repent, or turn away from, our sins. We should privately tell God each day what we have done wrong, our firm resolution to avoid doing that again, and asking him for forgiveness. We also can assist our devotion at Mass by remembering our sins and earnestly saying the confession with these sins on our hearts. We can also come to me or another priest and confess our sins in the Sacrament of Penance.

When our last hour comes, our soul will be brutally torn away from our body. Satan and the wicked demons will assail us at that hour to tempt us away from Christ with thoughts that He cannot save us, that our sins are more than He can forgive, and that we have no need of Christ at all. Although our guardian angel and patron saints will powerfully intercede for us at that moment, the singularly best way for us to prepare for the torment and temptation of our death is to be strong in prayer and pure in soul. And that requires preparation.

Advent is upon us. Holy Church has for many centuries preached on death this very Sunday, which is most proper for helping us prepare for Christ’s return or our death, whichever comes first.

This Advent, I urge you to prepare for the inevitable fate you face. I love you as my dear children. I want each and every one of you to prosper in the loving-kindness of Jesus Christ our Lord. I want each and every one of you to live with each other forever in God’s Kingdom. I want to enjoy your presence forever before God our Father in the Holy Ghost.

With these wishes of love and peace and enjoying you as you were made by our Lord God, I ask you this week to try at least one of two things. First, thoughtfully make a list of your sins and then reverently confess them to Christ either with the prayer of confession in the Prayer Book or in the Sacrament of Confession. Second, pick your most intractable or hardest to control sin and try very hard to confess and turn from it every day this week.

The best way to prepare is to exercise. The best way to prepare for a spiritual struggle is spiritual exercise. Try at least one of these confessions of sin this week and prepare to meet your maker. If you earnestly try, you will find yourself in better shape to be judged by Christ.

“that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal….”

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The Feast of the Annunciation is popularly called “Lady Day”, although it is a feast of our Lord. The date derives from an ancient idea, that you died on the day of your conception. Through figuring, early Christians thought that Christ died on March 25th, which meant His incarnation took place on March 25th. This led to December 25th as His birthday and to June 24th as the date of the conception and death of St. John Baptist. Despite early medieval attempts to move the feast outside of Lent, the original date prevailed.

From 1066 to 1752, the English held March 25th as New Year’s Day. Blessed Richard Hooker in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity during Elizabethan times wrote, “We begin therefore our ecclesiastical year with the glorious annunciation of his birth by angelical embassage.” For nearly 700 years, New Year’s Day was today. Can you imagine?

Our Lady was a woman amongst men, poor amongst powerful, young amongst those wizened in years, and unmarried amongst married. She was faithful, but she was the least of the Jews. And yet, through her faithfulness and obedience to God, she becomes the greatest of all people, men or women, who have ever lived who were not God Incarnate.

St. Gabriel tells her that God has “highly favored” her amongst all other people. You see, God heaps blessings on those the world despises. We see with the eyes of this world, of this culture, and yet God despises our order and our values except insofar as they conform to him. God blesses those whom he finds worthy and not those whom the world bathes with awards, treasure, and honor. “Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.” says Christ. And again He says, “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” And in the Old Testament, Isaiah lv.9: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

St. Mary’s response in great faith made her in the Holy Ghost a vessel through which God the Father poured God the Son into the world. The Blessed Virgin, though a creature, though our sister through Adam and Eve, became a vital and critically important part of God’s salvation of all the world and all mankind. We owe a great debt of thanks to her, but she gave it all up to God, and she would have us give it all up to God. When we submit ourselves to our loving and almighty God, the greatest things in Heaven and Earth can happen. Again and again, we see in Sacred Scripture God raising up men and women to fulfill his righteous will amongst us. Since we are created in God’s image and redeemed by God’s Son, we are important. As obedient to God’s will, we act vitally important.

The Blessed Virgin’s obedience did not lead to happiness unbounded. Remember her mourning at the Cross? Remember St. Simeon in St. Luke ii.35 prophesying, “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also”? She gave birth, not in the inn, but in the stables. They could only afford the sacrifice of the poor when they presented Christ to the Temple. She and Joseph fled with Christ to Egypt to save His life. She saw the priests and scribes conspire to kill Him. And yes, she was there at Pentecost as well. She lived a blessed life, but she lived neither a sumptuous or easy life.

We think that God’s blessing will bring prosperity and joy, but often God’s blessing brings hard, difficult, and painful work. Death and suffering accompany us on the journey Godward.

Those with easy lives might think they have gotten away with a well-lived life, when they have done nothing. Those who have faced an uphill battle through trial and tribulation may cry out for a rest, but may indeed have won a crown.

And note that heavenly visits inspire fear and wonder. We want to see an angel to comfort us and to strengthen our faith, but indeed we may cower in fear upon the sight of one. We pray for divine guidance, but find that truly divine guidance will lead us into danger and out of worldly prosperity. Our simple earthly minds cannot fathom nor comprehend the immense and profound wonder that a heavenly being such as St. Gabriel would have upon us.

Never doubt the courage of the Virgin when she placed herself into God’s hands during the visit by the angel. Such an overwhelming and scary experience for a young woman! But perhaps this is what our Lord meant when He said that we had to become as little children to enter into the Kingdom of God. He would have us remain innocent and open to fantastic experience, not hardened and jaded like we had earned every year of our life through hard work and bitter disappointment.

And if anything can happen, then what is next? Probably not what we expect. The faithful Christian should have a heart like St. Mary, open to the unbelievable possibilities of Almighty God, our Heavenly Father. We must truly believe that the Holy Ghost can do all things. We must truly believe that Christ is one of us and lived a life amongst us. We must believe in miracles and goodness and holiness and not insist upon having things our way.

As we are all brothers of Christ through adoption, and since we enter into eternal life through Christ, so we may faithfully and truly say that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the mother of us all. Christ saying to St. John from the Cross, “behold your mother”, and saying to his mother from the Cross, “behold your son”, is the symbol of this truth.

Moreover, St. Mary had the Lord inside of her just as the Messiah was within Israel, and Christ came forth from His mother just as out of Israel the Messiah came forth.

As the Blessed Virgin Mary is our mother and as she is a type of Israel, so she is a type of Holy Church. Through our mother Holy Church, we are birthed into new life. Thus Christians may call St. Mary our mother as well. It is as St. Mary as mother of us who through obedience allowed salvation into the world through Christ flips the work of Eve, who though mother of us all, allowed sin into the world through Adam.

In the lady parts of our Lady, God the Son became Incarnate Body and Blood, anticipating and prefiguring how this bread and wine shall become the Body and Blood of Christ for us to eat and drink on God’s altar in just a few minutes. St. John Baptist leapt in his mother’s womb when he encountered our Lord Jesus in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So we bow and kneel before Christ in His Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. And the Blessed Virgin helped make it happen.

If you love Jesus, you have to love His mama, for He certainly did. If you would love like Christ loves, you would love the Blessed Virgin Mary. But if somehow you love the Blessed Virgin more than Christ, she would be the first one to correct you and point you to her Son, for she followed Him, and obeyed Him, and was there at the Cross and on Pentecost.

The Blessed Virgin Mary shows us that God chooses the weak of this world, shows us that following God can be costly, and shows us that she is our mother as well as our sister. But most importantly, the Blessed Virgin is the model for Christian discipleship.

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.” This is the model of the humble and faithful Christian’s prayer, placing himself under God’s will.

Father Massey Shepherd said that St. Mary is the “perfect example of a humble acceptance of God’s favor and a ready and trusting obedience to His will. Here, indeed, one witnesses in purest form the self-giving response of a human life to the redeeming purpose of God.”

St. Mary is told she will be the mother of the Son of the Highest, and yet she makes no grand claims. She calls herself handmaiden, a servant, chosen by another. How often does God give us something small and we claim something big? How often do we boast of our station or wealth or knowledge or capabilities when it all came from our good God and we earned so very little of it? Give God the glory! We should learn from her.

And then she wishes that God’s will be done, foreshadowing Christ’s teaching of that in his prayer, “Thy will be done.” The Blessed Virgin teaches us how to behave before our Lord God. She is the prototypical Christian, our mother by example if our sister by birth.

St. Mary’s “yes”, as well as our “yes”, is only the beginning of a marvelous and gracious journey of faith. In the Gospel and the mission of the Church, each moment opens with opportunities to follow Christ, obey God, and spread the Gospel. Like St. Mary, our obedience to God should form our essential identity in Christ.

What St. Mary started at home one day by emptying herself to God before St. Gabriel culminated in Christ emptying Himself on the hard wood of the Cross that dark day upon the hilltop. We empty ourselves for God, not negotiating and wheedling with him about what pet trifles we might keep. Jesus says in St. Luke’s Gospel, “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

We surrender all to God. We obey God. We follow God. We empty ourselves for God. God is all we have, for we and all we have come from him.

“Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“…when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“Because we are sons”

Regarding the readings or lections for Christmas Day and the Sunday after Christmas, Fr. John Henry Blunt wrote:

“On the one day, the Son of God is shewn to us becoming the Son of Man: on the other, the sons of men are shewn to us becoming the sons of God, through the Adoption won for them by the Holy Child Jesus. We are “heirs of God through Christ,” because of the fulfilment of the promise conveyed by His Name, “He shall save His people from their sins.”

Our adoption as sons of God happens because of Christ. Christ is God the Son Who has taken on Flesh and is born of a woman. Because of Christ’s Incarnation, we can have the Spirit of God in our hearts and call God the Father, Abba, or father.

So let’s look at today’s lesson from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians in the fourth chapter, beginning with verses 1-3:

“1 Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all;

2 But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father.

3 Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world:”

Before Christ came into the world, there were pretty much only two sorts of people. There were the chosen people of God, the Jews, and there were those who did not worship the one true God, the pagans. St. Paul describes both of them as being held “in bondage under the elements of the world.”

God treated the Jews as his chosen race, but he treated them mostly like quarrelsome children. Think of how God punished David for his adultery or how God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind. In the previous chapter here in Galatians, St. Paul writes of how the Law of Moses was like a tutor teaching the children of Israel.

But God considered the pagans far more harshly, as they followed not God but the seasons and the stars and all manner of fables they told themselves to make sense of a harsh and unforgiving world. They grasped at foolishness in order to gain some knowledge of natural religion.

Thus all of humanity had the potential to become the sons of God, but this was a latent and untouched potential, for humanity had not reached the point where Christ’s presence and teaching would be most effective.

St. Paul continues with verses 4-5:

“4 But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,

5 To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”

God the Father sent forth the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, down to earth to be born of a woman. God the Son pre-existed Jesus Christ, Who is God the Son Incarnate among us. God the Son had no beginning and no end, and in the words of the Nicene Creed, is “eternally begotten” of the Father.

“The fulness of the time” is an awesome phrase. Why was the year of Christ’s birth so “meet and right” for His Incarnation? Fr. Melville Scott says it better than I do:

“Christ’s coming took place … at the time most suitable, when the world had learned that it was hopeless to think of improving the human race by means of any of the religions or philosophies then existing; when all was ready for the diffusion of a world creed, and the Empire by its arms and laws had paved the road for the messengers of the King of Kings.’”

And so the time was right for the Blessed Virgin Mary to give birth to the Christ. And in His Circumcision and Presentation at the Temple, Christ was clearly born under the Law, so that He might “redeem them that were under the law.”

The last two verses of today’s epistle are verses 6-7:

“6 And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.

7 Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.”

Because we are sons of God through Christ, Christ does two things. First He delivers us from evil, and then He supplies us with good. The evil is the curse of the Law, from which Christ delivers us. St. Paul spills a lot of ink on this one. We are no longer condemned for our sins because Christ has come into the world as one of us, suffered and died for us, and rose again from the dead, defeating death and sin and Hell forever.

The good He does is gain us our “promotion to sonship”, and so God the Father fills our hearts with the Spirit of his Son. With the shared sonship of the Father, the brotherhood of Christ, and the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, we who have faith in Christ and been washed in the waters of Holy Baptism receive abundant new life and participate in communion with God. Through that vital connection to the creator of the universe, we may realize and act upon our adopted sonship. At the Last Day, our souls shall rejoin our bodies, and we shall enter into Resurrection and perfect communion with the Triune God for all eternity. But even now we have access to the promises of God in our lives, in our world.

Because the Son of God was made flesh, we receive the adoption of sons. By the adoption of sons, we enjoy communion with the Father. Because we are sons, we have the Spirit of the Son in our hearts.

Christ taking on human flesh at the Annunciation – a holy day of obligation coming up in March, by the way – by His taking on our flesh from the Blessed Mother, St. Mary, we are ultimately saved from sin and promoted to the first-rank of creation. We enjoy blessed sweet communion with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Nobody on earth can look at you like you’re nothing, for you are the blessed sons of God.

There are many ways one gets adopted nowadays. One of those ways is when orphans in foreign countries, orphans living in hideous squalor, without family, without health care, without prospects for a long useful happy life, when those orphans get adopted by American or Australian or what have you couples, then they are brought into a safe and prosperous country and given – given is the word, mind you, for these are children without power or authority of their own – and given sonship or daughtership. Such a child is instantly given safety, clothes, a warm bed, loving parents, good medical care, schooling, and citizenship. If the child is handicapped, then even more is given to the child, for now the child’s disability is less crippling due to a more accepting society, laws guaranteeing access to public places, and healthcare which makes adjustments or corrections allowing for a more dignified and able life.

But there’s more. The child also becomes an heir of the family. Adopted children are not accorded lesser rights than natural-born children. They are accorded the exact same rights as children born into the family, but they are given them graciously. If the impoverished child is adopted into a rich family, that child will be heir to great wealth.

All of humanity suffers under the constraints of sin, disease, death, suffering, toil and all the consequences of our fall into sin. Each of us suffers so. On this earth in this life, we might think that some suffer more and some suffer less, but if we are to go to Hell, then we will all suffer horribly forever. Unless. Unless God were to come into the world and take on human flesh from a human mother, forever sanctifying the race which fell from God’s favor. If only a woman would perfectly obey where the first woman disobeyed. Then we might have salvation.

And we do thus have salvation through Christ! For He truly became flesh inside the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and united God and Man forever in His precious Body. Think on that when you kneel for the Holy Communion today. God and Man together made one Person in Christ Jesus our Lord, Who gave His precious Body and Blood to feed you, to eat and drink in your mouth, to take into your body so that you, body and soul, may be taken up into eternal communion with God the Father, so that you may become a vessel and tabernacle of the Holy Ghost, so that you may become the adopted brothers of the Son of God and eternal sons of the eternal God.

We hardly ever think on this. But we should. We should think on it every single day of our lives. And I’ll tell you what: You ought to be reminded of this every single day of your lives. For each of us, if we are to claim the name of Christian, are to pray the Lord’s Prayer every single day of our lives unless in a coma until the day we die.

And it starts off, “Our Father….”

We think that this is a simple and decent prayer and certainly one that other religions should be able to say with us. But they can’t! And why not?

Atheists acknowledge no God. Jews dare not call our God father. Moslems think of themselves as slaves of God, not sons. Hindus and Buddhists and Shinto folk do not conceive of God like we do.

Only Christians dare to call Almighty God their father! Isn’t that a kick in the pants? We sit around thinking, “Well, we’re saying the Lord’s Prayer. Communion will finally be here and then we sing and then we eat.”

Instead, we ought to stop and savor the word: Father.

I want to leave you with two big thoughts of how our adoption as sons of God permanently changes our lives.

The first thought is this: If we are truly adopted sons of the Most High God, the creator of Heaven and earth, then we are not merely passing through this world. God created this earth we stand on. And this is the day which the Lord has made. If we are the sons of God, then we are no longer renters with no attachment or investment in the things God has made and loved, but we are heirs and thereby owners of these things as well. Everything we let slide here we will have to answer for. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ll have to fix it ourselves.

The last thought is this: If we who believe in Christ, are washed in Holy Baptism, and commune with Christ in His Body and Blood are sons of God and tabernacles of the Holy Ghost, then we are all brothers and sisters. If we are joint-heirs with Christ of eternal life, then we will be more than neighbors for all of eternity: We will be related. Do we act like family? Do we love each other through thick and thin? Do we accord each other mutual respect? Or do we take advantage of each other? Worse yet, do we ignore each other? Do we gossip, slander, or insult each other? I wouldn’t be surprised if we will have to own up to each ill-considered and hateful word we’ve ever said about each other either in Heaven or before we get there.

“…when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.